Alright, this is probably one of the best cars I have found and bought to work on. After selling my beetle I was a little depressed and was browsing craigslist. I wanted a good daily driver what was not so new that I could not fix it or work on it. I really liked my last Mercedes minus the automatic transmission. Since the 300D and 240D never came to the United States with a manual they had to be imported or people swap in the manual transmission. I found this car imported from Germany in 1985, with the import plate and title to prove it.
It has a few paint issues, but that is to be expected on an older car. The best part of this car was how great it was taken care of. The interior is in really great condition and it only has 141k original miles on it.
So far I have only had to replace the upper control arms to smooth out the ride a little bit. Will probably change some more of the suspension at some point to as the rubber bushings on the older cars tend to be worn out. The manual transmission really makes this car a lot simpler to work on vs the vacuum controlled automatic. It also give a slow car a little better chance at being faster. Overall, I am pretty happy with this as my daily driver.
The Nonconformist's Guide to Engineering 